Tag: climate change

Whenever I post about the reality of climate change, I get the usual chorus of denialist outrage. This includes the odd ad hominem or two, like the sneering "What does an astronomer know about the climate?", because apparently not having an advanced degree in science makes someone a better judge of the data.

But the slings and arrows I get here are nothing, nothing, compared to what professional climate scientist Michael Mann gets. He is, after all, the researcher who first published the hockey stick diagram which shows beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth has warmed up. To the deniers, he is Enemy Number 1. They have attacked his diagram and his research many times, always coming up short. The data and methods are solid, and it’s clear the Earth really is warming up.

So what’s a denier to do when all the evidence is against them? They attack Dr. Mann himself, of course.

All that is, sadly, to be expected. But now, ramping up the rhetoric to full-on disgusting, comes The National Review. A far-right paper (to say the least), they are not exactly supportive of the reality of global warming. But a few days ago they published a blog article by Mark Steyn that calls Mann a scientific fraud. This may be expected from deniers, but doesn’t change the fact that when you say that the research done by a scientist is deliberately fraudulent, you are stepping into defamation territory.

Needless to say, Mann isn’t sitting back and taking this. He contacted his lawyer, who has sent a letter to The National Review saying they knowingly defamed him by accusing him of scientific fraud, and demanding an apology and that the defamatory article be taken down. Mann put up a copy of this letter on his Facebook page. As he points out, Mann has been cleared of all wrongdoing multiple times by multiple independent agencies (like here, and here, and here, and here, and of course here), despite the efforts of the global warming deniers to do whatever they can to take him down. I certainly hope The National Review complies, and issues an apology.

The Petermann Glacier is a vast tongue of flowing ice in Greenland. In 2010 it calved – broke off a chunk – releasing an iceberg far larger than Manhattan Island in New York City. That huge chunk of ice moved into the ocean and eventually melted in the Atlantic (see Related Posts below for more on that event).

And now Petermann has done it again. A crack appeared several years ago, and on July 16th conditions were right to allow a new chunk to break free:

Note the scale: the width of that glacier at that point is 20 kilometers, or 12 miles.

As before, we can speculate whether this is due to global warming or not. Icebergs calf all the time. However, note that the last time, the berg calved later in the summer (August), and this crack is much farther up the glacier than usually seen.

As climate scientist Michael Mann says, global warming is like loaded dice. You don’t know if any particular throw of snake eyes is due to them being fixed, but you’ll see a lot more rolls turn up snake eyes than you would otherwise. Global warming is predicted to give us longer, hotter summers, drier conditions across the US, more record temperatures, thinner arctic ice, and having it cover less surface area of the Earth. And, yes, more frequent glacier calving.

By the way, the 2010 calving event was the largest seen in nearly 50 years. And also by the way, June 2012 was one of the hottest since records have been kept. And also also by the way June 2012 had the highest land and ocean average surface temperatures in the northern hemisphere in recorded history. And oh, one more thing: it also was the 328th consecutive month with a global temperature higher than the 20th century average. You can read all about this in the NOAA report "State of the Climate Global Analysis" for June 2012.

That map shows how much higher than average temperatures have been across the US recently. In Colorado in particular, low amounts of rainfall coupled with dry weather (plus an ever-lengthening warm season allowing pine beetles to flourish and destroy living trees) made the state a match waiting to be lit… and that ignition has happened multiple times in the past few weeks.

And it wasn’t just Colorado of course, but also New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming… and not just here in the US, either, as Russia is also on fire.

Is all this due to global warming? Hard to say, exactly. However, these conditions are preciselywhat you would expect as the Earth warms: weather patterns change, temperature records get broken, conditions go from normally wet to dry, normally dry to wet.

"Weather" is what you look at if you want to know if you need an umbrella or not today. "Climate" is what you expect on average for a given day in a given place. Weather changes on short time scales; climate over long ones. But how long?

Weather + time = climate. It’s well past time to start thinking of that "time" as now.

I wrote a few days ago about the disgusting billboards put up by the far-right Heartland Institute, a climate-change denial group that apparently has no lower bounds to what they’ll do. The billboards, which went up in Chicago, likened climate scientists (and anyone who knows global warming is real) to mass murderers and madmen.

It was repulsive and hateful. After an uproar — and in less than a day — Heartland took down the billboards, but didn’t apologize for them. Instead they claimed it was an "experiment", and declared victory in getting attention. This would be why I use the words repulsive and disgusting.

And now, after a few bloggers wrote to State farm, the insurance company has announced they too will withdraw funding from Heartland Institute. State Farm specifically cites the billboards as the reason in their announcement.

The link goes to a copy of Mandia’s letter. On Monday evening, State Farm tweeted they were severing ties with Heartland.

Besides removing ties from a group with such awful tactics, it’s in State Farm’s best interest anyway. Global warming is having and will continue to have a profound impact, including droughts, floods, rising sea levels, and much more. Insurance companies will need to deal with this, and they need to be thinking about this now.

[UPDATE: Bernews is reporting the Association of Bermuda Insurers and Reinsurers will discontinue funding Heartland as well; they gave $125,000 in 2010/11.]

And we’re not done. Heartland still has quite a few corporate sponsors. Brad Johnson has created a list of them on Pinterest, how much they’ve given, and which ones have dropped Heartland due to its shenanigans. Heartland is hemorrhaging donors, but there’s still a long way to go.

The Heartland Institute, a far-right climate change denying "thinktank" has put up a series of billboards so disgusting, so vile, that I find it difficult to find words to tell you just how disgusting and vile they are.

So instead, I’ll show you one:

When I first heard of this earlier today, I thought it was a joke. No one would seriously do this, right? Creating an actual billboard like this would be taking Poe’s Law and aiming right between your own eyes!

But it’s real. Heartland actually put these up, and according to their press release, they’re proud of it. And other people Heartland has on the billboards? Charles Manson, Fidel Castro, and they’re considering putting up some with Osama bin Laden.

Yes, seriously.

I could go on and on about just how incredibly offensive this is, but you can read about it here, here, here, and here. [UPDATE: And here, here, and here.]

[UPDATE: Apparently, Heartland has decided to pull down the billboard ad… of course, they’re claiming it "got attention" but somehow neglect to mention this attention was overwhelmingly negative and disgusted. But you can expect Heartland to continue their skeevy campaign against reality; I’ll note that they not only do not apologize for the ad, but state outright they won’t apologize for it. Lovely. Science writer and humanitarian Shawn Otto has posted a list of names and links of companies that support Heartland, just so’s you know.]

Still, there’s one thing I do want to highlight. The press release is a non-stop firehose of misinformation and spin, but among the venom-dripping things they say, one bit of crazy stands out:

The people who still believe in man-made global warming are mostly on the radical fringe of society. This is why the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.

And the prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists? Like Michael Mann and James Hansen? Oh wait, those two are actual climate scientists. You know, the kind of people who are experts in climate science. The kind who don’t tend to sign climate change denial screeds.

Over at Scholars and Rogues, Brian Angliss tears it apart for the sham that it is. It’s a pretty good review that destroys the claims made in the letter and has plenty of links to back up the debunking.

I find a lot of the climate change deny-o-sphere pretty baffling. A lot of the claims are trivially wrong, a lot more are cherry-picked and can be seen to be wrong when presented in the correct context, and others are just spin and rhetoric ("carbon dioxide is plant food!") that is facile at best and outright nonsense at worst. Of course, many of them touted this letter by the ex-NASA 49 as more proof that climate change is wrong. Amazing.

OK, I know reality-based folks do. But keep that paragraph handy when confronted by the deniers. It may not change their minds, but people are listening to them, and we need to keep making sure the facts — the real, true, provable facts — are out there.

I’ve been getting lots of email and other notes about a group of 49 people — including some ex-astronauts — who have written a public letter to NASA complaining about the space agency’s stance that global warming exists and is caused by humans.

Basically, the bill will make sure teachers can discuss creationism in the classroom, as well as global warming denialism. The House version states,

This bill prohibits the state board of education and any public elementary or secondary school governing authority, director of schools, school system administrator, or principal or administrator from prohibiting any teacher in a public school system of this state from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught, such as evolution and global warming.

That whole "strengths and weaknesses" is for all intent and purpose a lie; we’ve seen it many times before. Of course science has strengths and weaknesses, but what these people are looking to do is be able to say any kind of antiscience rhetoric in the classroom and not get called on it. What the bill should call for is legislators to be tested on the strengths and weaknesses of their creationist beliefs that clearly contradict what’s known about the real world. Or, better yet, how what they’re trying to do violates the Constitution of the United States.

I would pay good money to sit and listen to that.

I also wonder how the Tennessee lawmakers would feel if, say, teachers used this potential law to teach about Islam, or astrology, or Wiccan beliefs. That would be interesting indeed.

The news about Heartland Institute just took a decidedly odd turn. Recently, internal documents leaked from the far-right group revealed their antiscience agenda, including their funding strategy, donor list, and most startlingly a paper outlining their strategy to "dissuade teachers from teaching science".

When these documents were posted, Heartland started threatening the sites hosting them, as well as bloggers who wrote about them including a 71-year-old veteran). This part is very important: Heartland has made repeated claims that the strategy paper is a fake.

Now, the leaker has outed himself: Peter Gleick, a research scientist with the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security, which among other things investigates the impact of hydrology on human health and how climate change plays into it.

In his admission, Gleick says he initially received the Institute’s internal documents in the mail anonymously. Given their potential impact, he tried to confirm their reality. How he did so, though, is something of an issue:

In an effort to [confirm the accuracy of the documents], and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name.

In other words, Gleick used a false identity to get more information from Heartland itself. This is an interesting situation, to say the least. I’ll note that faking an identity is not necessarily wrong or illegal. And if there is a greater moral good involved, like exposing dirty dealings on issues that have a major impact on people’s lives — say — it might even be understandable. On the other hand, if he impersonated someone real, then this may be a situation of identity theft. There’s also the question of whether he did everything he could to find out the veracity of the documents before taking the path he did. I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t have all the information, so I don’t really have an opinion on this. On the other hand I have very little doubt that how people come down on this point will depend very strongly on where they stand on the reality of climate change.

However, how he obtained this information is not really the point. The information on those documents and their veracity is paramount. In his article, Gleick continues:

The materials the Heartland Institute sent to me confirmed many of the facts in the original document, including especially their 2012 fundraising strategy and budget. I forwarded, anonymously, the documents I had received to a set of journalists and experts working on climate issues. I can explicitly confirm, as can the Heartland Institute, that the documents they emailed to me are identical to the documents that have been made public. I made no changes or alterations of any kind to any of the Heartland Institute documents or to the original anonymous communication.

Emphasis added. Note that Gleick is explicitly saying the strategy document about the Heartland Institute trying to dissuade the teaching of science is in fact real, despite the claims from Heartland saying it’s not. He is also saying he did not make any alterations, so again he is claiming they are actual Heartland Institute internal documents. Heartland has indeed admitted that nearly all of the documents are in fact real, but maintain the strategy document is a fake.

From the standpoint of an outside observer, this boils down in some ways to a he-said-she-said situation. Heartland says the document is a fake. Gleick says it is not. While people on both sides have made arguments for and against its authenticity, the actual evidence we have from both sides is circumstantial. Unless the strategy document contains some sort of traceable information, or the Heartland Institute’s files are opened, there may not be any way to know for sure. However, Gleick has said he can explicitly confirm the documents are the same. I expect there will come a time when he’ll have to do so publicly.

Obviously, some will paint Gleick as a criminal and fraud, and others as a whistleblower and hero. In the NYT blog Dot Earth, journalist Andrew Revkin has already said Gleick’s reputation is ruined and his credibility destroyed, while at least one commenter is already calling him a hero.